Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Parmesan "Cheese"

This Parmesan substitute has a salty flavor and the texture is just like the canned dairy version. I used this "cheese" in a creamy slaw salad dressing and it tasted great. The ingredients are nutritional yeast flakes, sea salt, and walnuts (recipe from the Go Dairy Free cookbook).

It was interesting to read up on nutritional yeast. I try to avoid yeast when possible, because I know that yeast overgrowth is very common and can cause major fatigue. (This is another good reason to avoid sugar, because yeast thrives on sugar.) But nutritional yeast is different from baker's yeast and brewer's yeast because it has essentially been "deactivated" in processing, and therefore cannot grow or cause candida. In addition, nutritional yeast has tons of vitamins and minerals!

So, back to the walnuts, salt, and nutritional yeast. You just run them all through a food processor until it looks like this:





It will be interesting to find out how this healthy substitute might work in place of Parmesan in other things like cheesy casseroles or sprinkled over spaghetti with meat sauce.



2 comments:

Becky Bartlett said...

We (I) use nutritional yeast to sprinkle on things!! Just used it last night! :)

Kati Potratz said...

Awesome! What do you sprinkle it on? I've heard it's good on popcorn.